Lilli and Bryan spent an hour adjacent to each other last Friday in Berlin, but it’s just as well they never met.
Lilli, a 12-year-old schoolgirl from western Germany, was one of a group of 21 youthful activists who sat down on a stretch of city Autobahn. Of them, 14 superglued themselves to the asphalt, surrounded by discarded food.
They were protesting against Germany’s climate record and demanding a new law to tackle food waste. Some 75kg of food per person is thrown away each year in Germany, according to a leading charity.
“I don’t understand what is so bad about us engaging ourselves so that no one has to starve,” said Lilli, above a chorus of car horns.
As their protest triggered a tailback and paralysed the Autobahn network, Bryan sat fuming in his truck cabin a few vehicles away from Lilli and the other protesters.
When a local television reporter pointed a microphone in his direction, Bryan shouted that he was just trying to do his job and that protesters should picket politicians instead.
“They should count themselves lucky that I had a nice f*** yesterday and am relaxed,” he said, forehead throbbing, “otherwise I’d be right up there.”
The clip went viral and, after it had been clicked 1.5 million times, Bryan was invited on to Bild TV for a seven-minute interview.
“Thankfully, there’ve been no groupies at my door,” he joked. “Everyone who knows me knows how I am: open and direct. The feedback’s been positive: finally someone who speaks openly.”
In its tone and focus, the interview had eerie echoes of the Netflix satire Don’t Look Up. In that film, physicists go on a US morning show to warn viewers of a meteor heading for Earth and instead are inveigled into a discussion about a pop singer’s messy break-up.
Unlike Bryan the truck driver, Lilli Schiller was not invited on to Bild TV. She travelled 400km from Oldenburg to be part of the protest, accompanied by her mother Lena. Lilli has been part of many Fridays for Future demonstrations since the start, the mother said, and is “burdened” by the challenges posted by climate change and species extinction.
“I find it dramatic that young people see themselves forced to sit on the street for their future,” said Lena Schiller, who looked on during Friday’s demonstration.
In total nearly 300 protesters have taken part in similar sit-down protests around Germany in the last weeks, according to climate activist group Last Generation.
Spokeswoman Carla Hinrichs accuses Germany’s federal government, by delaying its climate neutrality promise until 2045, of breaking its constitutional obligation to protect lives.
“The government is not only breaking international law but committing a crime against humanity by deliberately heading for a world hotter by two, three, four degrees with billions dying of hunger,” she said.
Like all good campaigns, the “Save Food, Save Lives” campaign has the entire city talking – but more about the protest methods and consequences, and not the protesters’ demands.
Some critics have focused on how, thanks to the sit-down protest, an ambulance carrying a woman in labour was trapped in the Autobahn tailback. Others have questioned the ethics of allowing minors to protest in a doubly hostile environment of a motorway packed with furious drivers.
Protesters shrug off criticism to press ahead with their core demand: for laws to curb the over-production of food – destined to be thrown away – through intensive farming, pesticides and antibiotics for animals.
After last Friday’s blockade they read out an open letter to the government and apologised to Berliners for the unpleasant but necessary disturbance: “We want to send out an alarm signal that we are all in great danger.”
Such protests have divided the Green Party, which is now back in power, with ministers struggling to balance their roots in the climate protest movement with the realpolitik of power.
When Green environment minister Steffi Lemke described the protesters’ civil disobedience as “legitimate”, she was attacked by her coalition partners for encouraging criminal behaviour.
Green agriculture minister Cem Özdemir said he sympathises with the protests but said roadblocks damage “our common goal”.
“You don’t get a majority in society behind you when you block ambulances, police or kindergarten teachers on their way to work,” he said.
As for truck drivers, when Bild TV presenters asked their guest a single question about the climate, Bryan suggested people do their bit by separating rubbish and taking public transport.
Talk then turned back to what the truck driver’s girlfriend thought of his explicit outburst. Bryan insisted she was “completely behind me”. Just in case, Bild TV’s co-host, a Cate Blanchett lookalike, dispatched Bryan from the studio with roses for his other half.
